At Last!

(No, I won't burst into song with "my love has come along.")

It's taken longer than I wanted, but finally What I Felt is done. Amazingly, the final two books (I've had to build four to get one saleable copy and an artist proof that I'm not embarrassed of) went very well: practice, in this case, has certainly improved my technique, particularly with gluing the translucent silk paper used on the cover (above, bottom right).

And since I knew I would be using PVA with the silk paper (and regular paste for the rest of the work), I decided to kill two birds with one stone and also build a model of the box I want to use to enclose How to Make a Peacock Fly.

While cutting the 11 pieces of book board needed, I realized I was running out of blades for my Olfa knife. So off I went to our neighbourhood DIY box store, where I got a great deal: 50 blades for $25.99, instead of the usual 10 blades for $6.99.

Inspired by my parsimoniousness (I hope!), construction of the box was simplicity itself, even though it's a little unorthodox: I like to think of it as the love child resulting from a mating between a regular two-part lipped base box and a Japanese hinged box.

It lets me have a good space for the dressed fishing hook to sit unencumbered, as well as have a separate storage area for the accompanying boustrophedon (ox-plow) book that will accompany it.

Models for each of the three components of this project now exist, and I have just under a month to finish it for an upcoming show at Arts on Atlantic.

As easy as the box was to construct in the end, the gestation was long and problematic: I thought of a range of concepts, including making a box where all four sides would drop down, a display niche, and even a miniature bookshelf.

What I ended up with was not only reasonable easy to construct, but even built on a course I took in Japanese box-making 18 months ago.

(The best part of doing all of this is that the final glue-up was done while 84 Charing Cross Road ran on our television -- a classic film for anyone who likes any combination of books, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Tottenham Hotspurs.)

So it was a busy, but productive week, and will likely be the template for more of the same in the next three months.

I can only hope they will be as successful as the previous seven days.